Cannes 2016: American Honey, film review – In effect a music video of tediously exaggerated proportions

This spontaneous-feeling film shows impressive closeness to the specifically American lifestyle of magazine subscription sellers, but it offers no perspective on it, says David Sexton
On an adventure: Sasha Lane
David Sexton23 May 2016

We meet 18-year old Star (luminous 20-year old newcomer Sasha Lane) dumpster-diving in nowheresville, aka Muskogee, Oklahoma. A white van, pumping out music, full of raucous kids, drives by, parking in the local Walmart. Intrigued, Star goes in to the store – and instantly forms a connection with their leader, rampant show-off Jake (Shia LaBeouf at his most strutting yet, saying something that). He jumps on to a checkout and, until security chuck him out, starts dancing to Calvin Harris and Rihanna's "We found love in a hopeless place". She has. She's hooked.

Next day she joins this crew and they hit the road, first to Oklahoma City, then all over - Kansas City, Omaha and Grand Island in Nebraska, Rapid City, Williston and Pine Ridge. This crew of a dozen or so college age kids are living in shared motel rooms, making money by selling magazine subscriptions, managed by Krystal, a hard-bodied bitch in lurid skimpies (Riley Keough, 26, Elvis Presley's eldest grandchild), who hires and fires at will, with Jake as her foreman, trainer and recruiter.

For the next near three hours, we follow these kids on the mother of all road trips, their hustling punctuated by dancing, singing, fighting, drinking, toking and fucking. There is no plot whatsoever, save that Star proves hopelessly infatuated with Jake and there's a bit of an ongoing power-tussle over him between her and Krystal. Star and Jake briefly share an Of Mice and Men-style dream of getting out of this life and buying a little place of their own (40 acres and a mule) but Krystal derisively explains to Star that she pays Jake a $100 bounty for each girl he recruits and he screws them all.

There's a fair bit of casual crime, theft from the houses of people unwise enough to let them in, people held up at gunpoint, but there are no consequences and no police ever appear. Mostly, they're just happy, listening to loud trap music (that's Southern rap coming out of the trap of the drug lifestyle), doing drugs, drinking, and dancing around. The others are thinly characterized. There's a doomy girl called Pagan who obsesses about Darth Vader; there's a guy who has a pet flying squirrel; there's a dick who's always topless and loves getting out his dick. They're going nowhere but they're oddly cheery. And the film's director Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights, now 55) is down with the kids.

Leader of the pack: Shia LaBeouf

She based this film. which she wrote as well as directed, although clearly much is improvised, after reading a 2007 New York Times article, Door to Door: Long Days, Slim Rewards; For Youths, a Grim Tour on Magazine Crews, about these travelling salesmen, so it has a documentary basis, or did then. And she made it by casting mainly non-professionals and taking them on the same road-trip depicted in the film, living in cheap motels for two months and working with a minimal crew.

The great allure of this movie is the weaving cinematography of Arnold's regular cameraman Robbie Ryan, obviously strongly influenced by the dancing handheld work of Emmanuel Lubezki for mystic Terrence Malick and showy Alejandro G. Inarritu. Ryan clearly got right in the midst of these kids as they partied and danced the film is so close up to Star as she takes her journey, you're on it with her. (Actually, there's a point where she and Jake are having sex on the grass when you think they might ask the cameraman, clearly on the ground with them, to give them some space.)

Even more remarkably, Ryan has found amazing depth and richness of colour and contrast in his journey across these states, from derelict shacks to palatial estates, oil fields to truck stops. It's often beautiful just as photography, even if not taken any further as narrative. Arnold's repeated insertion of images of natural life insects, especially, birds, even a bear are even more obviously derivative of Malick and seem token and perfunctory. Star has a proclivity for releasing trapped insects, a symbolism which seems heavy-handed in an otherwise spontaneous-feeling film.

The film American Honey most resembles, in being so in love with the lifestyle of its much younger subjects, is Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers of 2013 - and lo! it turns out that Andrea Arnold spotted her lead, Sasha Lane, a college freshman from Texas who had never acted before, during Spring Break in Florida. She was a happy find: she is great-looking and has her own way of making it seem that every moment she's there, it's her time, what happens matters. She's on an adventure.

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American Honey (towards the end of the film, the crew all sing along to Lady Antebellum's 2010 hit of that name "nothin' sweeter than summertime and American honey") is the first US film to be made by Andrea Arnold and it shows impressive closeness to such a specifically American lifestyle, a transatlantic equivalent to her working-class commitment in her UK films. But it offers no perspective on it, expect perhaps a bit adulatory. Nostalgie de la boue! is what a character in a French drama written in 1855 exclaims when he is told that if a duck is transferred to a lake of swans, sooner or later it wants to go back to its own pond.

There is no reason for this film to begin where it begins or end where it ends, if ever. It is in effect a music video of tediously exaggerated proportions (although trap fans might disagree). Moreover, it needs you as a viewer to be as captivated by Shia Lebeouf's displays (smashing up the room when he thinks Star has been with someone else, showily motorbike riding, etc ) as the heroine is herself. Not possible, I'm afraid.

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